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deprived areas in Northern Ireland, the Society also seeks to address need beyond North Belfast. Deprivation is addressed through assistance, both directly and indirectly, for those who are disadvantaged in education, training for employment, accommodation and health.

      Some of the projects underway in 2019 may illustrate the nature of the work. ‘Building Better Futures’ is a partnership with the Building Change Trust and the Ulster Community Investment Trust which together have established a fund from which small voluntary organisations may obtain loans to tackle disadvantage. For example, the loans may provide training programmes for young adults with learning needs, services to improve mental health and well-being and improving sports facilities.

      The ‘Barbour Fund’ was established with the Hilden District Nursing Society to advance education and training by way of bursaries and grants. This has included support for the Belfast Hospital School which provides for those excluded from the education system, whether by reason of illness or removal from formal schooling. Funding has also been provided for activities for older people suffering from isolation.

      The ‘North Belfast Heritage Cluster’ involves 15 local heritage-based voluntary organisations headed by the Society that seek to advance the regeneration of the immediate area. The cluster includes various churches, the Carnegie Library and the North Belfast Working Men’s Club. The project receives funding from the National Lottery Heritage Fund.

      Direct grants have been made to NI Hospice to support those requiring palliative care. The grants have supported a building programme and a renewal of the means of delivering services.

      The Society also seeks to encourage philanthropy by influencing others and supporting organisations to further that purpose. The promotion of our rich heritage includes access to an extraordinary collection of archive material dating back before 1752, containing minutes and letters detailing the lives of thousands in the Poorhouse and the actions of those who managed the home, amounting to a social commentary on the times. The archive is an historical treasure. Programmes of tours and talks and lectures allow the sharing of that history.

      The Mary Ann McCracken Foundation

      The Society has created a Mary Ann McCracken Foundation designed to broaden public knowledge of her immense contribution to addressing the social issues of her day, to increase appreciation of the values of that contribution and to relate that experience to the current work of the Society in addressing the social issues of today. This republication of Ms McNeill’s work is a part of that development.

      In her scholarly work, Ms McNeill captured the energy of Mary Ann. The disadvantage Mary Ann confronted all her life has its own form and substance today. That same energy remains essential to address present disadvantage. It is to be hoped that the republication of this life of Mary Ann McCracken will inspire those unfamiliar with her history to added concern for the objects of the Society in the care of the elderly, the relief of poverty, homelessness, distress, infirmity and sickness.

      Mary Ann embodied many admirable qualities. She could have been the subject of President Barak Obama’s remarks in the Waterfront Hall in Belfast on 17 June 2013:

      So many of the qualities that we Americans hold dear are imported from this land – perseverance, faith, an unbending belief that we make our own destiny, and an unshakable dream that if we work hard and live responsibly, something better lies just around the bend.

      Sir Ronald Weatherup

      President of Belfast Charitable Society

      September 2019

ORIGINAL FOREWORD

      At the close of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries the North of Ireland was profoundly influenced by the American, the French and the Industrial Revolutions. Mary Ann McCracken’s long life spanned this great era of upheaval and creative change. A woman of strong character and generous sympathies, with a ready pen and a forthright mind, she was solidly embedded in that vigorous, industrious, intellectually alert middle class which played such a decisive part in moulding British and Ulster life. She suffered deeply from the tragic consequences of rebellion. But she was unbroken, and after the saddening days of 1798 and 1803 she threw herself with enthusiastic energy into living a many-sided life dominated by family affection and humanitarian zeal. Mary McCracken and her circle were keen letter writers and fortunately much of what they wrote has survived. This mass of correspondence has been used by Miss McNeill in composing her account of Mary McCracken’s life. Miss McNeill brings to her task not only industry but also a sympathetic understanding of her subject’s ideals and feelings and keen awareness of Belfast, the growing city, pulsating with energy, in which Mary Ann McCracken’s life was spent.

      R.B. McDowell

      Trinity College, Dublin

      18 September 1959

ORIGINAL INTRODUCTION

      Mary Ann McCracken is known to many as the devoted sister of Henry Joy McCracken, most famous of the Northern leaders in the Irish Rebellion of 1798. Few, however, are aware of the other activities of her long career and of the charm and forthrightness of her personality. Except for the short monograph included in Historical Notices of Old Belfast [1896] by R.M. Young, no story of her life has been written. Yet from contemporary sources and from her own letters and writings it is possible to get a complete picture of the sort of person she was, and of her varied and outstanding achievements during one of the most fascinating periods of Irish life.

      In a great age of letter-writers Mary McCracken was herself a fluent correspondent, and the series of letters that passed between her and her two brothers while the latter were prisoners in Kilmainham Gaol throws a vivid light on their authors and on the history they helped to make. Only a small part of this correspondence has previously been published. At the end of her life another series of letters shows her as the friend and collaborator of Dr. R.R. Madden, author of The Lives of the United Irishmen. In the years between come her close association with Edward Bunting and the renaissance of Irish Harp Music; the successful muslin business that she established in conjunction with her sister; and her work for the women and girls in the Belfast Poor House, recorded in the Minute Book of the Ladies’ Committee of the Belfast Charitable Society of which, for a quarter of a century, Mary McCracken was Honorary Secretary. I am greatly indebted to Dr. R.W.M. Strain for unearthing this treasure and bringing it to my notice, and to the Belfast Charitable Society for permission to use it.

      Any one of these activities would have marked Mary McCracken as an interesting and unusual woman. In 1792 her contemporary, Mary Wollstonecraft, regarded with despair the fashionable young women of her day spending their time “going they scarcely care where for they cannot tell what.” Why, she asks in The Vindication of the Rights of Women, would they not study politics, enter business, or take up “the art of healing”? One such occupation per person would have satisfied that most progressive of eighteenth century writers; yet, as Mrs. Wollstonecraft was penning her words, there was in the growing town of Belfast a young woman of twenty-two who herself would achieve all three distinctions, for Mary Ann McCracken was already a student of politics, had already embarked on a business enterprise and was preparing herself to be a healer of physical and social ills.

      For the historical and social background against which Mary’s life was lived I have drawn largely from contemporary sources. To all students of the period the correspondence, known as the Drennan Letters, between Dr. William Drennan in Dublin and his sister Mrs. McTier in Belfast, is an inexhaustible mine of information and delight. Both were deeply involved in the political affairs of the day. Mrs. McTier’s husband – Samuel – was President of the 1st Belfast Society of United Irishmen, and Dr. Drennan, eminent physician and author of the Test to which all United Irishmen subscribed, held office in one of the Dublin societies when, in 1794, he was charged with sedition and successfully defended by John Philpot Curran – “that marmoset of genius” – to use Drennan’s own description of the renowned counsellor.

      While Historical Collections relating to the town of Belfast and Belfast Politics were published anonymously, it is known that they were compiled by Mary McCracken’s cousin, Henry Joy, junior. They, with the files of the Belfast News-Letter, the newspaper which his family founded and

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